Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal最新文献

Several ethicists have defended the use of responsibility-based criteria in healthcare rationing. Yet in this article we outline two challenges to the implementation of responsibility-based healthcare rationing policies. These two challenges are, namely, that responsibility for past behavior can diminish as an agent changes, and that blame can come apart from responsibility. These challenges suggest that it is more difficult to hold someone responsible for health related actions than proponents of responsibility-sensitive healthcare policies suggest. We close by discussing public health policies that could function as an alternative to contentious, responsibility-sensitive rationing policies.

Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, "How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis" (Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant 2020). In their paper, Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose lockdowns. We focus on Winsberg, Brennan, and Suprenant's contentions that knowledge about COVID-19 resultant projections were inadequate; that epidemiologists were biased in their estimates of relevant figures; that there was insufficient evidence supporting the efficacy of lockdowns; and that lockdowns cause more harm than good. We argue that none of these claims are sufficiently supported by evidence, thus impairing their case against lockdowns, and leaving open the question of whether lockdowns were justified.

This paper presents a challenge to the view that benign 'white lies' may be therapeutic in dementia care and preferable to more truthful alternatives. Drawing on Sissela Bok and Bernard Williams, the paper develops three key points: first, that another person's dementia is not a reason to suspend one's customary reluctance to deceive others; second, that the commonly drawn contrast between benign deceit and blunt disclosure is too simple to frame arguments for the acceptability of deceit in dementia care; and third, truthful regard-regard for a person living with dementia as one for whom truth matters, as it does for oneself-is a foundation for beneficent concern that is neither infantilizing nor condescending. The paper proposes that a morally significant human bond is established through regard for another person as one for whom truth matters, just as it does for oneself, irrespective of another's dementia, and that within dementia care, the commission of deceit should be seen as an unsettling exception to a general principle of truthfulness.

In "Were Lockdowns Justified? A Return to the Facts and Evidence", we argue that Eric Winsberg, Jason Brennan and Chris Surprenant fail to make their case that initial COVID-19 lockdowns were unjustified, due to the fact their argument rests on erroneous factual claims. As is made clear by a response in this volume, the authors mistakenly take us to have been defending the imposition of lockdowns. Here, we clarify the aims of our original paper, and emphasise the importance of getting the facts right when making philosophical arguments in such a contentious domain.

If the free speech clause of the First Amendment is interpreted to mean that speech is to be granted special protection not accorded to other forms of conduct, then a free speech principle, distinct from a principle of general liberty, must be posited and must receive a distinct justification. A defense of a free speech principle must explain why the harm principle either does not apply in the case of speech or applies with less force than in the case of all other forms of human conduct. In this article, I argue that none of the defenses of the right to free speech on offer succeeds in showing why even significantly harmful speech is deserving of special protection not afforded non-speech conduct. More work needs to be done to justify a free speech principle and, until such work is done, the belief in the existence of a free speech principle that undergirds and justifies our current free speech practices is no more than an article of faith.

In the face of the increasing substitution of free speech for academic freedom, I argue for the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of the latter. Academic freedom has evolved alongside universities in order to support the important social purpose universities serve. Having limned this evolution, I compare academic freedom and free speech. This comparison reveals freedom of expression to be an individual freedom, and academic freedom to be a group-differentiated freedom with a social purpose. I argue that the social purpose of academic freedom behooves an inclusive approach to group differentiation.